June 16, 2008

Too Much Information

I had the pleasure of playing golf at Pebble Beach last week. On the first hole (par 4) I hit my second shot to within two feet of the hole. Although a mediocre golfer, I can make 2-footers 9 out of 10 times.

Then the caddie said, "Play it just outside the left edge. Two-thirds of the ball outside the lip and one-third inside." As soon as he said that, I knew I would miss it. And, sure enough, I did.

Sometimes we make simple things way too complicated. We confuse ourselves and make the task much more difficult than it needs to be.

This is especially true in advertising. It's hard to imagine that there's another industry that has taken a simple idea -- it's lucrative to publicize your product -- and complicated it as much as we have.

"Shakespeare was a storyteller. You're a copywriter.""Good ads appeal to us as consumers. Great ads appeal to us as humans.""As an ad medium, the web is a much better yellow pages and a much worse television."

"Sometimes success in the advertising business requires sitting quietly and letting clients proceed with their hysterical delusions."

"Marketers prefer precise answers that are wrong to imprecise answers that are right."

"Brand studies last for months, cost hundreds of thousands of dollars, and generally have less impact on business than cleaning the drapes."

"The idea that the same consumer who was frantically clicking her TV remote to escape from advertising was going to merrily click her mouse to interact with it is going to go down as one of the great advertising delusions of all time."

"Nobody really knows what "creativity" is. Every year thousands of people take a pilgrimage to find out. This involves flying to Cannes, snorting cocaine, and having sex with smokers."

"Marketers habitually overestimate the attraction of new things and underestimate the power of traditional consumer behavior."

"We don’t get them to try our product by convincing them to love our brand. We get them to love our brand by convincing them to try our product."

"In American business, there is nothing stupider than the previous generation of management."

"If the message is right, who cares what screen people see it on? If the message is wrong, what difference does it make?"

"The only form of product information on the planet less trustworthy than advertising is the shrill ravings of web maniacs."

"There's no bigger sucker than a gullible marketer convinced he's missing a trend."

"All ad campaigns are branding campaigns. Whether you intend it to be a branding campaign is irrelevant. It will create an impression of your brand regardless of your intent."

"Nobody ever got famous predicting that things would stay pretty much the same."